The MedGym Podcast

Simone Biles trained about twenty hours a week at fourteen. Aimee Boorman, the coach who set that number, explains why it was not forty.

Aimee met Simone in 2003, when Simone was six years old, at Bannon's Gymnastix in Houston, and coached her for the next thirteen years: three world all-around titles, four Olympic gold medals in Rio, and never more than thirty-two hours a week in the gym. She is a four-time USA Gymnastics Coach of the Year, the 2016 U.S. Olympic Committee Coach of the Year, an FIG brevet judge, and the author of The Balance: My Years Coaching Simone Biles, with a foreword by Simone. Since Rio she has coached internationally, including with the Dutch team at the Tokyo Olympics, and she judges, coaches and mentors from Arizona.

Gina and Aimee are friends, and this is a conversation between two people who have spent years on the same side of the same argument: that the way to get the most out of an athlete is not to use her up. It is the most practical hour the show has recorded, and it is full of numbers, every one of them smaller than you would guess.

In this episode:

• What a training week looked like for Simone at fourteen, and why "she is superhuman" is the wrong explanation
• The most hours she ever trained, all the way through Rio, and what the extra hours were actually for
• Three beam routines a session, four full floor routines a week, and the assignment with a ceiling: hit three in a row, or make five, or do seven and we are done
• Why Aimee thinks that if Simone had been old enough for the 2012 Olympics, there would not have been a 2016
• "Let them get out of it": the pet peeve she has with coaches, and the one situation where it turns into "look deeper"
• The teenager who shouted "I just have PMS" across the gym, and why her coach loved it
• The one skill they decided was not worth the risk, and why the reason was a podium, not an ability
• Tokyo from the end of the vault runway: what she saw on Simone's first step, and what the people around her got right
• Three things a coach should never say to a kid who is scared of a skill
• Am I going to be the coach who breaks her, and the line that answers it: there had been Simones before Simone

Aimee Boorman judges, coaches, mentors and speaks from Arizona.

The practitioner directory, the gymnastics sports medicine certification for healthcare practitioners, and every episode's show notes are at medgym.net.

New episodes of The MedGym Podcast every other Thursday. If this one is useful, send it to a coach, a parent, an athlete or a practitioner who needs it.

Dr. Brian Cole operates on professional athletes for a living. Four out of five people who walk into his office will never be operated on at all.

He is an orthopedic sports medicine surgeon at Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush, a professor at Rush University Medical Center, and team physician for the Chicago Bulls, the Chicago White Sox and the Joffrey Ballet. He has published more than a thousand articles, he has spent twenty five years building the evidence base for cartilage restoration, and in 2025 he won one of the biggest research awards in orthopedics for his work on joint preservation.

He also trademarked the phrase "spare the scalpel," which is an unusual thing for a surgeon to build a practice around.

Gina and Dr. Cole have worked together for more than twenty years, and this is a conversation between two people who send each other patients. It is less an interview than an argument they both already agree on: that the hardest part of this work is never the operation, and that most of what shows up on a scan was never the problem.

In this episode:

• Why no more than twenty percent of the people in his office will ever have surgery, and what the other eighty percent get instead
• The first question he asks a patient, which is not where it hurts
• Why he says nobody has ever felt better or been cured by an MRI, and what a two page scan report actually tells you
• The seven million people over sixty five walking around with a rotator cuff tear they will never know about
• What actually predicts whether physical therapy works, which is not the size of the tear
• Why ACLs almost never tear in the first quarter, and what film of NFL knees showed when they went looking for different mechanisms
• What PRP and stem cell injections really do, from the surgeon who chairs the board that governs their ethical use
• Gina on baseline testing, and why the only jump height that matters is the one you had before
• A Volkswagen body with a Ferrari engine, and the fourteen year old brains making adult decisions
• Why he thinks of himself as a waiter, and what he wants you to do before your next appointment

Dr. Brian Cole practices at Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush in Chicago.

The practitioner directory, the gymnastics sports medicine certification for healthcare practitioners, and every episode's show notes are at medgym.net.

New episodes of The MedGym Podcast every other Thursday. If this one is useful, send it to a coach, a parent, an athlete or a practitioner who needs it.

Jaycie Phelps did not make a single routine in warm-ups at the Olympic Games. Then she led off for the Magnificent Seven.

She was sixteen, first up on the night the United States won its first Olympic team gold in gymnastics. What her coach Mary Lee Tracy said to her in the seconds before she saluted is the title of this episode, and it is still the sentence she coaches from thirty years later.

The rest of the conversation is what came after. Three knee surgeries, including a cadaver meniscus transplant no gymnast had ever had, and a doctor who told her she would never compete again before helping her map the comeback anyway. She finished on her own terms. Now she runs the Jaycie Phelps Athletic Center in Indiana, where every athlete is tested once a month and the whole program is built on the idea that confidence is a training effect rather than a personality trait.

• Leading off at the Olympic Games with zero warm-up hits, and the thing a coach says that makes a routine possible anyway
• The comeback that was supposed to be impossible: three surgeries, a cadaver meniscus, and a doctor who mapped out how many punches she had left
• Her actual assignment sheet, from fall preseason to the week before regionals, and how it flexes for the athlete having a rough day
• Why athletes hide pain, and what they are really protecting when they stay quiet
• Confidence as a training effect: the numbers-to-consistency-to-swagger chain her gym runs on
• Why skills get harder and more dangerous as an athlete gets weaker, and what monthly testing catches
• The year and a half after Atlanta when seven teenagers were rock stars, and what nobody prepared them for
• Repeating a level as a strategy rather than a setback
• The moment at thirteen when she nearly quit

When a gymnast lands badly, the camera goes to her face. Dr. Mark Hutchinson is one of the people already moving.

He has been one of them at six Olympic and Paralympic Games, three of those as head physician for all of Team USA. He is a distinguished professor of orthopedics and sports medicine at the University of Illinois Chicago, head team physician for UIC Athletics, and his first Games was Atlanta in 1996, the same summer the Magnificent Seven won gold across town.

He and Gina have shared patients for years, which is why this conversation moves fast and goes deep. Two clinicians who have worked the same Games, the same athletes and the same arguments, on what it actually takes to keep an athlete whole.

In this episode:

• Why elite sports medicine is a communication job before it is a surgical one, and how you earn the right to say "they need water"
• What changed in thirty years, from coaches who trained without water breaks to a Team USA mental health program that leads the world
• The overtraining thread running through nearly every injury he sees, and the season his soccer program had six hip labral injuries instead of one
• Why "back in four months" is not an ACL plan, and what functional testing and mental readiness screening replaced it with
• What athletes tell him after he asks the coach to step out of the room
• Biologics, honestly: PRP, stem cells, the $2,000 shot insurance will not cover, and why an injection is not caulk
• The Achilles warning signs most people train straight through, and the antibiotic risk factor almost nobody hears about
• Specialization, wearables, and the duty that comes with choosing one sport
• Rio 2016, the Final Five, and the moment he remembers best, which has no medal in it

Dr. Mark Hutchinson practices at the UIC Sports Medicine Center in Chicago and can be reached at [email protected].

The practitioner directory, the gymnastics sports medicine certification for healthcare practitioners, and every episode's show notes are at medgym.net.

New episodes of The MedGym Podcast every other Thursday. If this one is useful, send it to a coach, a parent, an athlete or a practitioner who needs it.

A lot of people leave this sport when the sport is done with them. Amanda Borden never left.

She was captain of the Magnificent Seven — the seven women who won the first Olympic team gold in American gymnastics history, in Atlanta in 1996. But this conversation is about everything that came after. She built her own gym. She has now spent far longer coaching this sport than competing in it. And she raised a Level 10 gymnast of her own — her daughter Kennedy, who competes for Alabama in the NCAA next season.

Athlete, coach, gym owner, gym mom: four different seats in the same sport, and she’s still in love with it. Gina and Amanda talk about what a healthy gym actually looks and sounds like on an ordinary Tuesday night, how you keep a gym joyful and still get kids to a high level, and what coaching your own daughter teaches you about coaching everybody else’s.

In this episode:

• The captain's vote she did not cast for herself, and who she wrote down instead
• What Mary Lou Retton told the 1996 team about the press, and the sentence Amanda walked into the Georgia Dome repeating
• Why "why is it tight?" is a better question than another hamstring stretch, and what her own coach taught her about asking it
• Having a voice as an athlete: being able to tell a coach yes or no, and not be in trouble for the answer
• What a healthy gym looks and sounds like on an ordinary Tuesday night, and why you watch the adults instead of the kids
• The gap between medically cleared and actually ready, and what "you're good to go" misses about a gymnast
• Twenty beam routines a day, or two: coaching athletes with completely different capacities in the same gym
• Coaching her daughter Kennedy from Level 8 to Alabama, and the rule she set before any of it started
• Telescope goals, microscope goals, and the ladder goal in between

Amanda Borden coaches at Gold Medal Gymnastics in Tempe and Chandler, Arizona.

The practitioner directory, the gymnastics sports medicine certification for healthcare practitioners, and every episode's show notes are at medgym.net.

New episodes of The MedGym Podcast every other Thursday. If this one is useful, send it to a coach, a parent, an athlete or a practitioner who needs it.

The athletes we love deserve better than we've given them.

For 25+ years, physical therapist and sports-medicine specialist Gina Pongetti Angeletti has been the person athletes, coaches, and crying parents turn to on the competition floor when something hurts and no one can say why. After thousands of those conversations, she's opening them up to everyone.

The MedGym Podcast is coffee talk with friends — the honest kind — about health in sport: why some athletes thrive while others quietly break down, and what it really takes to keep a body and a mind in the game. Across three pillars — mental, physical, and training — Gina gathers the best physicians, trainers, coaches, and clinicians in gymnastics, dance, and figure skating, plus the athletes who came out the other side whole, telling you how they did it.

The why and the how behind it all, with a sprinkle of humor and a whole lot of heart.

New episodes every other Thursday. One heart, one body, one child at a time.